Cloud Native Computing Foundation · CKAD · Advanced
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam objectives
Cloud Native Computing Foundation publishes 5 exam domains with official weightings. The weight tells you where your marks come from, so your study time should roughly follow it.
1. Application Environment, Configuration and Security
25%- ConfigMaps and Secrets, both as environment variables and as mounted volumes
- SecurityContext: runAsUser, capabilities, and read-only root filesystems
- Resource requests and limits, and the QoS class they produce
- ServiceAccounts, RBAC from the workload's side, and CRDs
2. Application Design and Build
20%- Pod design: init containers, sidecars, and multi-container patterns
- Jobs and CronJobs, including completions, parallelism and failure handling
- Volumes: emptyDir and PersistentVolumeClaims, and when each fits
- Building and referencing container images correctly
3. Application Deployment
20%- Deployments: rolling updates, rollbacks and revision history
- Blue/green and canary approaches expressed in Kubernetes primitives
- Helm basics: installing and templating a chart
- Kustomize overlays for environment differences
4. Services and Networking
20%- Services and how selectors bind them to pods
- Ingress rules for HTTP routing
- NetworkPolicy for ingress and egress isolation
- Debugging why a service has no endpoints
5. Application Observability and Maintenance
15%- Liveness, readiness and startup probes, and the failure each prevents
- Reading logs and events to locate a fault fast
- kubectl debug and ephemeral containers
- Understanding the API deprecation cycle
Our practice exam spreads its questions across these exact domains at these weightings, so your score in each one tells you precisely where you stand.
Practice these objectives free →